THE chances are that you’ve never heard of David Koepp. It’s more than likely, though, that you’re familiar with his major work, that it has perhaps even moved you to laughter, tears, and, most likely, a thrilled, childlike excitement. Because this bespectacled 42-year-old inhabitant of New York is the writer behind some of the biggest films in cinema history.Koepp can claim a string of those summer blockbusters with budgets that sound like government spending plans, and audience figures to match, including Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, and Spider Man. There can be no doubt that his work has perm- eated the popular consciousness just as thoroughly as, say, Eminem’s has. But you could pass him on the street and never know.Now Koepp has teamed up for the second time with a rather more famous purveyor of popular cinema. Together with Steven Spielberg, he has laboured to bring H G Wells’ War of the Worlds (pictured right) to our screens. The faces of Tom Cruise and Spielberg can now be seen on every magazine rack. But amid all the fuss, few will stop to consider that this version of Wells’s classic took shape, initially, at the desk of David Koepp.“Steven approached me to write the movie,” Koepp tells me from New York. “My first thought was that War of the Worlds has been done so many times, what was the point of another? But it became clear that, by sticking to the point of view of this one ordinary guy, as Wells did, we could make a different, great movie.”Indeed, War of the Worlds seems to occupy a place all of its own in the modern Western psyche. Wells’s novel, published in 1898, played on British anxiety over German militarisation. In 1938, the world tense on the eve of war, Orson Welles revived the tale in a faux documentary radio broadcast so credible that it famously had Americans fleeing their homes in panic. The question naturally arises, then: what is the communal angst that has given rise to this new version? The obvious answer is concern over Iraq.“Iraq was in my mind by the end of writing, but not at the beginning,” says Koepp. “The genius of the story is that everyone can fit their own personal fear around it, that someone out there the fascists, the communists, the Americans is coming to get them.”It was that slippery essence that Koepp was charged with bringing to the screen. Once he’d taken the call from Spielberg, I wonder, how did he set about it? “As always with an adaptation, I go back to the novel and outline each scene on a separate piece of card, so I can spread the whole thing over a table. There usually follows about 72 hours of depression. Then I start the first draft.”For War of the Worlds, drafts and re-drafts passed between Koepp and Spielberg for months. It’s perfectly normal, I learn, to get to draft 12 before shooting has even begun: “With Steven, if you pass him a draft and he has only two notes, that’s bad. It means you haven’t engaged him. If there are 100, maybe he’s interested.”The last time that Koepp and Spielberg worked together was in 1993, on Jurassic Park. At the time it was the highest-earning film in history. Koepp’s last blockbuster, Spider Man, took more than dollars 400 million in the US alone. Don’t these audience figures place almost impossible demands on any writer? How do you go about making a story supposed to appeal to just about everyone?“You can’t think about that,” says Koepp. “You just have to write for yourself. You love movies, you know what you want to see. Forget the budget, forget the audience size.”But you’ve had so many hits, I say, that you must have boiled the multi-demographic film down to a magic formula. Can you reveal the secret to writing a Jurassic Park, or a Mission: Impossible? Unsurprisingly, it turns out to be more complex.“You’re working in a genre, and that means your audience has certain expectations you can’t ignore. They want to have those expectations fulfilled, but at the same time, part of the thrill of a movie is to be surprised. That’s the challenge. Your audience is saying: ‘This better surprise me, but don’t you dare change anything’.”But one can’t help feeling that, beyond the formal craft, Koepp must have some telescope pointed at the human heart through which only he can look, so reliable is his ability to enthral the filmgoing public. Given the feat of mental engineering, then, that is writing a script, isn’t it a wonder that directors are considered the ultimate authors of the films we all see?“There’s no question that the balance is off,” he tells me, without any sign of agitation. “It’s the French! They developed this auteur theory, where the film is the creation of the director, and it has stuck.”But it doesn’t bother you, when you see someone else claim a film that started life at your desk? “I’ve become more sanguine. I guess you’d say I’ve got used to ‘film by’ credits, and republican presidents.”

I second that. In the beginning of the book, Wells criticizes the behaviour of the European colonists, who greatly annihilated the original human inhabitants of the other continents such as the Tasmanians, the aboriginals and the Indians in America. I haven't seen any referations to anxieties of German militarization in the book even though a read it for innumberable times.

The Tempest is an advanced assault vehicle, which carries two heavy Heat-Rays and a Canister Launcher.

I second that. In the beginning of the book, Wells criticizes the behaviour of the European colonists, who greatly annihilated the original human inhabitants of the other continents such as the Tasmanians, the aboriginals and the Indians in America. I haven't seen any referations to anxieties of German militarization in the book even though a read it for innumberable times.

You didn't see them, oever, because there aren't any (references to German militarism). You're right about the intro setting a very different moral analogy. Colonialism, however, isn't as comfortable a target as the hackneyed old bug-bear of German militarism.

In fact, there is precious little in WotW to reflect the international politics of 1898. There is one (which I rather like). Mrs. Elpinstone is deathly afraid to go to France, for fear that the martians might actually be better company.

In 1898, it was the French who worried the British. The Germans were a non-item.

British fears of German militarism were old hat by the time Wells wrote his novel, so he wouldn't have bothered with that idea. Right after German power was demonstrated in the Franco-Prussian War, a British author came out with "The Battle of Dorking", which covered the conquest of Britain by the Germans and their superior military. (Better-disciplined soldiers and using their own fleet to lure the Royal Navy into a naval minefield.) Even orientals---the "Yellow Peril"---would get more play than Germans for awhile.

British fears of German militarism were old hat by the time Wells wrote his novel, so he wouldn't have bothered with that idea. Right after German power was demonstrated in the Franco-Prussian War, a British author came out with "The Battle of Dorking", which covered the conquest of Britain by the Germans and their superior military. (Better-disciplined soldiers and using their own fleet to lure the Royal Navy into a naval minefield.) Even orientals---the "Yellow Peril"---would get more play than Germans for awhile.

Ah, so someone else has heard of the Battle of Dorking, eh? Good show.

Yes, after the Prussians's quick victory over the French in 1871, there was a very brief worry that they'd just keep moving west. That didn't last long enough to become old hat. It was harder for the British to get worked up over the Germans.

The French, on the other hand, were age-old rivals. (I suppose you could trace it back to 1066 if you wanted to) Up until 1903 or so, there was a veritable flood of fiction in which the French starred as invader/villains, while angst tales with German villains were rare. No, the author was lazily generalizing backwards with WWI and WWII culture villains.

But even if we adjust the article's author's words to read "French militarism", it still doesn't wash. Wells wasn't writing within the usual invasion story genre. Other than that one sentence about Mrs. Elphinstone's francophobia, there's nothing.

Maybe it's because of the two main area's: Flanders, where the Belgian people speak Dutch, and Wallonia, where the Belgian people there speak French. And in the East of Belgium is an area where the people living there speak German...

The Tempest is an advanced assault vehicle, which carries two heavy Heat-Rays and a Canister Launcher.

They were going to Belgium (Ostend)? Why was Mrs. Elphistone afraid of the French people?

I believe the brother said they were going to France. Ostend was just the ferry's landing point.

As for Mrs. Elphinstone's fears: The villinous image of the French was almost an English tradition. Reprobate, immoral, scheming, ruthless, popish -- the French were viewed to be the opposite of how the British viewed themselves: civilized, moral, sportsmanlike, trustworthy, etc. This dualism owes itself more to Manicheism than reality.

Imagine a 1917 Mrs. Elphinstone being told she was to travel to Germany. She'd have imagined that everyone there would eat babies, cut off the hands of children, rape the young women and shoot all men. That is, when they weren't burning libraries or smashing things while drunk.

there is a very brief reference to the Germans in WOTW where Wells remarks that the news of the Martians in Woking did not cause as much of a stir in London as an ultimatum to Germany would have, however this is the one and only reference and the influence of British concerns of German militarisation on the book are otherwise non existent. The only issue WOTW was related to in its own time was the British Empire and its expansionist tactics. Otherwise WOTW is a general statement on many subjects, it is anti war and it has much to say on spirituality (although thankfully not too much) and the nature of people in a crisis among others. Its specific references are few which is what helps it retain its impact today.

The book demonstrates what a far superiour power can do to an far iunferior power. So the west against the Native Americans is a good example. German and British comparrisons are to similar. Their technologies too close.
There has to be a vast gulf between the two waring sides for the metaphor to work. Germany were not that advanced.

The reason, I think, that the article's author spouted nonsense about WotW being a reflection of fears over Germans, is that WWI (and 2) propaganda worked so hard to make the Germans into the image of unstoppable other-worldy beasts.

We've been steeped in that brew for so long, it's become part of our culture. It wasn't, however, what Wells and his audience had been steeped in. They had several generations of fretting over the French (Napoleon, et al) brewed into their culture.

But, as others have said, Wells wasn't really writing a francophobia tale. His was much more about the plight of a radically inferior race/species suffering the whims of a vastly superior.

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